Blushing and Sweating
Blushing and Sweating are two common concerns of the social anxiety sufferer. To some, blushing is a sweet and endearing quality, but for the social anxiety sufferer it can feel like a nightmare. For them, rather than a slight pinkness in their cheeks, their blushing can often be more describable as looking beetroot red, feeling like their face is on fire and something that not only affects their face, but spreads in a blotchy manner to their neck and chest.
Likewise, for the social anxiety sufferer who is concerned about sweating, it is often not just a matter of a slight dampness under the arms on a hot summer’s day. Many report profuse sweating on the palms their hands, face, armpits and other areas of the body. This is usually exaggerated when in social situations where they least want it to appear and it can be particularly problematic for people whose job involves shaking hands a lot.
When we get anxious, our sympathetic nerve activity is increased. This results in various changes in our body, including blushing and sweating, which serve to help ready us for an adverse situation. In the distant past, most adverse situations usually involved a physical danger that needed to be run away from or fought off. This can still be true, but is less so in the world we live in today. Both running away and fighting involve physical activity and that produces excessive body heat. To make our bodies more efficient and increase our chances of survival, humans have evolved to start cooling themselves through sweating when danger is anticipated. This is great when the danger is a swarm of killer bees and you need to run as far as possible, but it is not so great when the danger is the potential rejection of your colleagues when giving a presentation.
Blushing seems to be less explainable than sweating. Scientists have not figured out exactly why we blush when we are anxious or embarrassed. It is possible that it serves to communicate our remorse to others which may mean we are treated less harshly when we get things wrong, but the exact reasons for it’s function remain elusive.
Although blushing and sweating is a natural and healthy part of being human, many social anxiety sufferers end up feeling very self-conscious and anxious about these physical traits. The big problem is that getting self-conscious and anxious makes one blush and sweat more rather than helping with the situation. People often get stuck in a vicious cycle where they fear the onset of blushing and sweating in social situations and then this causes them anxiety which then actually creates the very blushing or sweating that they feared happening in the first place. The thought of other people noticing this then causes more anxiety and consequentially more blushing and sweating and so on.
Although it often does not feel like it for the sufferer, the main issue that needs to be resolved is not the actual blushing or sweating, but rather the fact that they think something bad might happen if other people notice their blushing and sweating. Once these psychological issues are resolved and the cycles are broken, blushing and sweating will not be exaggerated by anxiety and they will cease to be a problem.
Often the ways that people have come up with to try and cope with these physical traits, such as habitually hiding them, tend to only serve to worsen the problem in the long-term. This can lead to people feeling like they are fighting a losing battle and like they are stuck with an excruciatingly embarrassing physical problem they cannot solve. This desperation is reflected in the increase in the number of people who risk irreversible surgery to reduce their visible anxiety symptoms.
For some, operations such as Sympathectomies can seem like the best escape route out of their suffering, but these operations can sometimes lead to worse problems that cannot be easily solved, or solved at all. These include permanently increased sweating elsewhere on the body and abnormal facial features. These risks can be avoided if people get the appropriate psychological help to address the root cause of their severe blushing or sweating.
It is fully understandable how when someone feels stuck with a problem, and when their own efforts to overcome it result to nothing, they turn to such drastic measures to seek relief. People considering this option should know that there are effective and risk free alternatives that actually address underlying psychological issues rather than just treating the symptom. Ponder the question: If someone has a spider phobia, would you treat them by killing all the spiders in the world, or would you work to help them come to terms with the fact that the everyday spiders they are scared of pose no threat to them?
Tags: Blush, Blushing, Embarrassing, Embarrassment, Hyperhydrosis, Sweat, Sweating, Sympathectomy, Vicious cycle
July 22nd, 2008 at 12:14 am
Thank you, this is a great article. When I feel uncomfortable in social situations, I sweat excessively on my face, hands, and underarms. This is very embarrasing and uncomfortable. And once started you become very self conscious and it just becomes worse.
Sometimes if I take off my glasses it helps to keep my face a little cooler, but usually I excuse myself to the bathroom where I try to take deep breathes and calm down. If it is really bad, I usually splash some cold water on my face and then dry off.
September 20th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
I hear you Justin. My body is the same way. The main difficult times I have is when I’m in a class room, like sitting in the desks with people around me I get really nervous, they don’t even have to do anything and I sweat.
My social anxiety would be almost extreme, but I still do go out, but mostly I avoid classroom settings, crowded places or places that cause major attention to myself.
I really wish I didn’t have this to..I wonder what our problem is.?
September 30th, 2008 at 1:33 am
Hi Justin and Jay,
Thanks for the comments. The first step in understanding this problem is to recognise that although the sweating feels like the problem, the actual problem is our anxiety which causes the sweating, or more specifically our fears about what people will think about the sweating that triggers the anxiety. The ironic thing is that if we didn’t care about the sweating we most likely wouldn’t sweat. By becoming more conscious of our precise fears we can have more control over them and therefore more control over the sweating. I shall talk about this in more depth in my self-help program.
October 6th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Hi Nick,
Thank you this great article as I finally understand why I experience this. It is becoming a problem for me. I will try my best to explain my situation as I feel it is very unique.
First of all I am deaf and use ASL (American Sign language) as my prefernce form of communication. However, I do speak and read lips quite well when communication with hearing people who do not know ASL such as people from my work. I am currently single and am looking for a relationship. The main difficult times I have is when a hearing woman that I am interesting in approach me to ask me questions about work, I will suddenly break out in a an uncontrollable sweat and it is very obvious. The woman does not know that I am intereasted in her as I have not gotten that far as I am waiting for the right time to do it. This situation just happened about an hour ago and I google this topic and found this article. I feel I just blew a good opportunity as I am truly embarrassed she witness this. It only took ten minutes to get over this once she left after getting what she needs. It only happen when hearing women that I seem to like more than just a friend. However, if a deaf woman approach me and i like her more than a friend, it is not a problem at all. I find this very strange and frustrating. I just can’t controlled it When I am talking with other hearing women who I am not interested in or know that they are married or in a relationship, it is not a problem. I don;t want to limit myself to just meeting deaf women to see of we can form a relationship or not.
I have to figure out a way to get over this and hope you can provide me with some suggestions. I know once I feel comfortable about who I am with, then it is not a problem.
I could go on and on but prefer to wait and see what your response will be before going further if you need me too.
Thanks for listening and look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks
Steve
November 23rd, 2008 at 1:29 am
Found your website/article as I am going through the internet and researching the articles and posts on sympathectomy, a subject I have been researching for over a year now. My interest is not purely empirical, I have had the surgery in the beginning of 2007.
Sympathecomy causes profound physiological, emotional and cognitive changes. It affects biochemistry and the neurotransmitters in your body/brain. It has been succinctly described as a procedure that separates the viscera from the central nervous system. And that is why it is used also to treat patients with anxiety disorders and phobias (among many other conditions like schizophrenia and addictions) It is widely used to treat palmar, axillary sweating and blushing, in fact it has become a large and profitable industry, some centers/surgeons deriving their main income from these procedures.
But let’s have a closer look what the jargon that is found in the advertising really means! Is the disruption of the feedback from the body to the brain such a good thing?! Is the elimination of racing heart and all the markers of hightened arousal such a good thing?! There is one major problem with this concept. It does not eliminate ONLY ‘bad’ emotions, negative emotiions like fear and anxiety. It caps them all, so people are not able to emotionally respond. Is that something anyone of us would really want? I do not think so!!! IN fact, I think it should be illegal. The widely accepted James- Lang theory of emotion clearly states that there is no emotion without the increased heart rate, cardio-vascular, physiological and chemical changes that occur when we are facing a stimuli that would normally trigger this response. Emotion is the experience of these – unconscious – changes that occur. You are your body, and your personality is determined by it.
Studies have also shown that people who have undergone sympthectomy do not respond to physical and mental challenge as controls. When you ’shift’ gear, when your are ready to focus, to use your brain, it immediately increases bloodflow to your brain, so your ‘computing’ is accelarated. This does not happen after sympathectomy. The same applies to physical challenge. Your body does not respond to the demands of the task at hand effectively. Some websites promoting/selling the procedure cautiously will disclose that perhaps if you are an athlete, the surgery might affect your performance. I am sorry to say, but it will affect your performance even if you are not an olympic athlete. How about going up a flight of stairs making you breathless and dizzy?!
So from my experience: I am now an outpatient at a SPINAL CORD INJURY clinic, as many of the symptoms (of the autonomic dysregulation) are the same as with people after spinal cord injury (above the T5).
Sympathectomy, the elective surgery for a benign condition that in most cases could be addressed by other means is an irreversible, destructive operation, at his applies to the clamping method, no matter what the ads and the surgeons tell you. You do not have to believe me, just ask a specialist in ANS or a simple neurologist if they think that after the removal of the clamps the sympathetic chain can recover?! By the way, 99% of the doctors tell you that the cut/clamp a nerve. Not so! The sympathetic chain and the ganglia is far more complex than a nerve.
I am more than happy to support any of the claims I made here. If you visit my blog where I have published many articles from the medical journals on the adverse effects of sympathectomy. The available material out there is astonishing.
By the way, did you know that sympathectomy was the predecessor of lobotomy, until the ……less invasive, easier lobotomy came along? I say: food for thought!
If you undergo the surgery, it will change your personality, it will flatten all your emotions, you will not feel the ‘fire in the belly’, in fact you will feel like a zombie. So sitiuations that triggered anxiety before will leave you cool and untroubled. You will not CARE! There will be no emotions that will make you blush any more. This is immediate, irreversible and permanent.
You will also have the many unavoidable consequences of the abnormal ANS function: disabled thermoregulation, which I can tell you not a COMPENSATORY SWEATING. There is nothing compensatory about it, it is abnormal and disabling and it will be trigered by things that normally would not trigger sweating. You have been able to hide the sweaty palms, but trust me, you will not be able to hide the soaked clothes and the seats you leave behind you. You will not be able to use airconditioned public transport or go into a building with airconditioning (in summer) because it will feel like wearing ice sheat when you enter the cold interior. Te initially increased circulation to your hands will slowly reverse, and you will end up with hands that are painfully cold. Raynaud’s is one of the long term side-effects of ETS.
If all this sound unbelievable, then remember that even after the adverse effects (turning people into full-blown zombies) was known, it took 20 years to phase it out from practice. The guy who invented it got a Nobel prize for his invention.
Here is a summary from Dr Nagy: “ETS can alter many bodily functions, including sweating , heart rate , heart stroke volume , blood pressure , thyroid , baroreflex , lung volume , pupil dilation, skin temperature, goose bumps and other aspects of the autonomic nervous system . It can diminish the body’s physical reaction to exercise and/or strong emotion, and thus is considered psychiatric surgery. In rare cases sexual function or digestion may be modified as well.”
To learn more, go to: http://sympathectomy.blogspot.com/
March 10th, 2009 at 12:27 am
I thought I was the only person who felt this way, I have always been the center of attention I was a social butterfly in High School, I was a cheerleader, in tons of pagents. I do not know what has happened to me! I am from KY and I moved to NC about 2 years ago and that is when everything went down hill. I have not had a steady job in 7 months because of the way I feel in public or around people. I can not even go to the store I am so scared I will breakout in my (rash) that I stay in the house. I do not know how to fix this problem I just wanna be my outgoing self again and stop feeling UGLY and LAUGHED at! I would love to be my old self. But I do not know how to overcome this, its like it has taken over my life. I have tried to talk to friends and family about this problem but no one seems to understand, they think I am crazy when I explain to them how I feel about myself. I feel so ugly, hatted, and judged by everyone. When I am alone and think about the way I feel in the back of my mind I know it is silly but no matter how much I try to convince myself that I should not feel that way, it does not help ANY!
April 17th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I am sorry that I have not been able to reply to everyone’s comments. I just want to say a few things that hopefully will start to address what has been said.
Jessica, when you said ‘no matter how much I try to convince myself that I should not feel that way, it does not help’ I think you talk for many people with social anxiety. People can end up feeling hopeless about overcoming it because their efforts seem to have no effect or even seem to increase their anxiety. This is the trap of social anxiety where often the things that seem to help are usually the things that are keeping it going. They provide short-term relief at the cost of long term suffering. The more we try and deal with and manage social anxiety, the more we get wrapped up in it’s trap, so it can help a great deal to focus away from the anxiety, letting it do what it wants, while focusing on creating good in our lives where we can. This is easier said than done because social anxiety is habitual and the habits can be persistent, but if you are persistent about forming new ones, you’ll start making progress. This is a brief answer to a complex issue, but I hope it helps somewhat.
Steve, it seems the main issue is not only what hearing women will think about you being deaf, but also about what they will think about you appearing anxious and sweaty. Make sure you do not try and hide your anxiety or exit situations where there are opportunities that interest you because of it. Doing so undermines your confidence leaving you feeling more vulnerable to rejection and therefore more anxious. Keep your attention on the reasons why you are a desirable person.
It saddens me to hear of people struggling not only from their social anxiety, but also from their treatments for it, as Mia shared with us. I am still working on some self-help materials and hope to get something released this year, even if it just covers the core of what needs to be learnt, rather than being fully comprehensive. Although a comprehensive self-help solution is what I’ll be aiming for in the long-term.
April 20th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Nick and all the people who have posted:
Thank you for your article and for sharing your experiences. It’s so good to know there are others going through the same thing. Like Jessica, I was a social butterfly most of my life and was in charge of many speeches and presentations for work. I never had a problem speaking or working a room. Now, every time I’m in a meeting or in a social situation, I am overwhelmed with the fear that I will begin sweating…and i normally do. All over my face and I know people can see it…I usually have to leave the room. It’s debilatating and embarassing and it came out of no where. Have taken Xanax and that doesn’t work.
Nick…are you recommending therapy with a general psychologist?
Thanks so much in advance.
Dave
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Hi Dave,
Ideally, I’d recommend people get help via a Chartered Clinical or Counselling Psychologist who has trained in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and who has extensive experience of helping people overcome social anxiety. CBT isn’t perfect, and my approach is not completely in line with it, but since CBT is available in lots of areas now, I believe it should be the option that is tried first, and tried extensively. I believe that most people, if they learn it, apply it and persist with it, can make considerable progress with CBT. My preference for Clinical or Counselling Psychologists does not mean to say that some Psychiatrists, Psychiatric Nurses, Psychotherapists or other related professional don’t offer as good or better therapy.
I would definitely recommend that people persist with a psychological approach as opposed to biological ones such as medications or surgery. For some people medications may be appropriate or even life saving, especially if they are prone to self-harm or self-neglect. But, their use should always be discussed with and monitored by an appropriately qualified doctor and, I believe they should never be presented as a complete solution on their own, and they should always be coupled with a psychological approach such as CBT.
I will be releasing a self-help audio program at some point which will discuss my approach and how it improves on CBT. I can’t give a date yet, but I hope to have something out this year.
Best Wishes,
Nick
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Hi Nick,
I am currently in my last school year, an important year for me, and am experiencing severe facial blushing and sweating more and more in social situtaions. It began only happening when in particularly embarassing situations, however it has gradually increased and happens regulalry on a daily basis now. It’s very hard to explain to people, and i find myself constantly worrying about when it will next happen and what people might think, and am unable to concentrate on more important things like my eduaction. Class room environments are especially bad triggers for me, and i find myself worrying about blushing and sweating even before the lesson has begun, which of course only makes the problem worse. It’s getting unbearable at the moment and is really impacting my life. What should i do?
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:26 am
Hi Chris,
I would recommend seeing if there’s a social anxiety support group near you. It can really help to meet others going through the same thing. The blushing and sweating you are experiencing are part of a cycle you’re caught in where anticipatory anxiety about blushing or sweating actually triggers you to blush and sweat. Then because you start blushing and sweating you get more anxious and the symptoms increase. To break this cycles it’s a question of learning to be O.K. with the blushing and sweating and accept it. Then because you won’t be getting anxious about it the symptoms won’t worsen. It’s a matter of accepting a small amount of blushing and sweating to prevent a lot of it. You see the blushing and the sweating isn’t the enemy, but our fear of it is.
Going to a support group can help because you’ll be able to see that the blushing and sweating that others are getting very embarrassed about doesn’t look that bad from an outsiders perspective helping you be more O.K. with your own blushing and sweating. Also, meeting others going through the same will help you realise that what you are experiencing is a very human thing and you are not alone with it. If this is really causing you a lot of distress and affecting your school work then do see a doctor or therapist about it. It’s probably best to find one who specialises in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Self-help books can also be helpful if you put in the work with the exercises in them.
You may also find it helpful to read some of the stories on this website, http://www.social-anxiety.org.uk/puce/puce-stories.htm
All the best,
Nick
November 27th, 2009 at 3:43 am
What do you know about NLP/hypnosis? Can someone with excessive blushing really benefit from such a thing? I’m finding quite a bit of information online that suggests this is a treatment that actually helps many people.
November 28th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Hi Joy,
In my years of running social anxiety self-help groups I have not heard of anyone with social anxiety or blushing making significant lasting progress using Hypnosis. Of course though, if someone had overcome their social anxiety they probably wouldn’t seek help from a self-help group. Additionally though, I’ve not seen anyone express in the busy social anxiety internet forums that hypnosis has significantly helped them. I had a short-lived interest in hypnosis several years ago, but I find other approaches offer people more potential for solid progress.
There are a lot of promises made about products on the internet, but few of them are true, especially the ones that suggest a quick and easy solution is the answer. Hypnosis is attractive to many people because it is a passive approach where most the work is done by the therapist, but a more active approach where you take on the task of making specific changes to your thinking and behaviour can but much more productive.
Often people say that hypnotherapy helps them relax while in the therapy or at home but their anxiety returns in the actual situations the are scared of. Also some people seem to experience some short lived benefits, but it seems this is often not long-term.
NLP is different from hypnosis but the two are often associated because NLP partly came about due to Richard Bandler and John Grinder’s (co-founders of NLP) studies of the hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson. Also Richard Bandler does a lot of work with Hypnotherapy in the present day and followers of NLP often follow his lead.
Learning about NLP has been helpful for myself in conjunction with other appraoches, but many NLP practitioners only go through a few weeks training and often have little knowledge of social anxiety or other mental health problems. I generally recommend that people learn about it themselves from books if they are interested, but be hesitant about spending money on visiting an NLP practitioner.
As always, with both NLP and Hypnotherapy, the skill and experience of the therapist/practitioner is paramount. Some may be very helpful and knowledgeable, while others could be costly roads to nowhere. As far as I know, Hypnotherapy and NLP are not regulated (in the UK at least) and quality will vary greatly. I would strongly encourage people to try Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) first as I meet lots of people who say this is beneficial for them and the therapists are usually part of a professional regulated body such as the BABCP. At the end of the day though, the decision must be yours.
Best wishes,
Nick